Veritas
by surrexi
Summary: Are we going to talk about it, or are we going to keep not talking about it?  JackKate, 2.09 tag


**_Veritas_**  
Jack/Kate 2.09 Tag PG  
_Summary:_ Are we going to talk about it, or are we going to keep not talking about it?  
_Complete:_ Yes

* * *

Jack fiddled moodily with the small vodka bottle, swirling the swallow's worth of liquid left inside around in circles. The silence between he and Ana Lucia was awkward and heavy, nothing like the comfortable silences he'd often enjoyed on the beach with other crash survivors.

"What happened to you?" he said finally. "You were the last normal thing I remembered before… before. A flirty girl at an airport bar." He turned his head so he could study her profile. "Now I'm sitting here having a drink with you because no one else will talk to you because you killed one of our own, and held another hostage. Not to mention the damage you could have done to Sawyer." He shook his head. "Libby said you were going to leave Michael and Jin out in the jungle."

"Trauma does things to people," Ana said, teeth gritted.

"You were putting on an act at the airport. The girl who was flirty and whose only problem was a fear of flying is not the girl who gains control of a group of people by waving weapons around and shooting anyone who dares to disagree."

"You have no idea what we went through!"

"Yeah, I do. I talked to Eko, I talked to Libby. To Bernard. We were infiltrated as well, you know. Claire was kidnapped. Charlie was dead for about five minutes, but…" Jack knew it wasn't him who saved him, but he had trouble saying the word miracle these days. "We have a graveyard, too," he finally finished, his voice solemn.

"You're obviously the leader here, Jack. Haven't you had to do things you regretted afterwards?"

Jack flashed briefly on Sayid's torturing of Sawyer for Shannon's inhalers, but shoved the memory aside. "Maybe. But I haven't killed anyone. And I didn't intimidate anyone into following me. They chose me…mostly against my better judgment," he added ruefully. "I didn't take control. They gave it to me."

"Unlike me," Ana supplied.

Jack looked out towards the ocean, nodded slightly. "Unlike you."

Ana held out the cup Jack had given her, now empty of alcohol. "I guess we won't be having any more drinks together."

"We don't drink much around here. I appropriated all of the alcohol to use as disinfectant." He took the cup from her hand.

"Right." Ana's voice was characteristically bitter as she got to her feet. "So nice talking to you, Dr Jack." She turned and walked away before Jack could respond.

"Why were you talking to her?"

Startled, Jack jumped to his feet and whirled around at the sound of Kate's voice. Unbidden, the feeling of her in his arms came flooding back, the taste of her filled his mouth.

"Kate."

Neither Jack nor Kate took steps toward each other, but both could feel the tension between them build.

"Why were you talking to her?" Kate repeated. Jack looked in the direction Ana had walked away as if to refresh his memory as to who he'd been talking to.

"Finishing some unfinished business," he answered.

"That involved alcoholic beverages and an ocean view?" She tried to tell herself that one kiss in the jungle, from which she herself had run away, didn't give her the right to be jealous. It wasn't working, and that only frustrated her more.

"We _live_ on a beach, Kate. And yes, it involved alcohol. But only one bottle. Don't worry, there's plenty to keep pouring on Sawyer."

The tension between them rose at the mention of Sawyer's name and the bitterness in Jack's voice. "He's awake," Kate said softly.

Jack's eyes sharpened as the doctor in him took over and the jealous man was shoved aside. "He is? How did he seem?"

Kate laughed slightly. "Like Sawyer."

"Well, I suppose that's what we were hoping for." Despite his best effort, Jack sounded less than enthusiastic. They stood there in silence, three feet of buzzing air between them for endless minutes.

"Look," Jack finally said, "are we going to talk about it or are we going to keep _not_ talking about it?"

"We're on shift at the hatch in half an hour," Kate said softly. "Once Sawyer's asleep, we'll have some privacy there."

Jack glanced around at the survivors mingling around on the beach and supposed that one was better than thirty, even if that one was his apparent rival. "So we will."

They arrived at the hatch to find Sawyer leaning drunkenly in the doorway, evidently having hit up the stash of alcohol Jack kept in the hatch.

"Doc!" he exclaimed, his voice slurred. "You should have told me not to drink with the medication. I had one little drink and bam, I am wasted." He turned to Kate. "Hey good lookin', where's Black Beauty?"

Kate rolled her eyes and slung Sawyer's arm around her shoulders. Painfully reminded once again of the night she'd blown up her childhood home with Wayne still inside, she half-dragged, half-walked Sawyer back to the hatch's bedroom. Sawyer muttered lewd suggestions in her ear as they moved through the hatch, and with every step Sawyer's face seemed to melt into Wayne's, until Kate finally dropped him on the bed and pulled the blanket over him.

A patented Sawyer-leer on his face, he looked up at her. "You're beautiful," he said.

Forgetting Jack, who had trailed after them, Kate scoffed. "Careful. The last man like you to tell me that after I'd sent him to bed drunk ended up suffering a fiery death."

But Sawyer was already unconscious. Jack, however, was not. When Kate turned around and saw him in the doorway, the look on his face spoke volumes.

"I think it's time we had that talk now." Kate's voice was resigned. "I trust this time you won't stop me before I get the truth out?"

Jack's eyes held a wealth of conflicting emotions. "I think maybe you just did. But I'm all for full disclosure."

Kate sighed. The two of them made their way to what they'd dubbed the breakfast nook – the table and the space being too small to refer to as a dining room by any stretch of even their civilization-deprived imaginations. They slid into seats across from each other and Jack leaned back, an expectant look on his face as he let her gather her thoughts and begin.

"You and Sawyer have something in common." Kate ignored the way his eyes hardened at her words. "You both remind me strongly of men who died because of me." And she told him everything. Her words were halting at first as she described growing up with Wayne, taking refuge in her relationship with Tom. But her voice strengthened with the telling, as though just getting the words out relieved her of some of her pain and guilt.

Jack wasn't feeling much like a priest, but he knew he was hearing her confession. And if her words lightened her heart, they also lightened his. They were making progress. Where it would lead, Jack didn't know, but at least now there was honesty between them. That was all he ever wanted from a woman anyway – he reflexively shied away from thoughts of Sarah and the breakdown of their marriage.

"So that's my story," Kate finished. "My crime. And I regret everything except for the one action that started it all. So I guess I don't really regret anything. I'm not a good person, Jack. I'm sorry I can't be a good person."

Jack reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and kept his eyes locked on hers. "You told me once that the little toy airplane belonged to a man you killed." He smiled a little. "You were wrong."

"But if I hadn't…"

"You didn't kill him. A cop did, and it wasn't your fault he was in the car with you. You told him not to come, and he came anyway."

"I pulled him into it. I came to see him." She looked pleadingly into Jack's eyes, and she wasn't sure if she wanted him to agree with her or keep insisting it wasn't her fault.

"If I'm as similar to Tom as you say, then I can tell you that he would have wanted you to come to him for help." He kept steady eye contact. "And once you did, he would have had to keep giving it, because there would have been nothing else for him to do. Because of who you are and who he was, what he was. Doctors are an egotistical bunch. We have to believe, every day, that we can save everyone, fix everything. Otherwise how could we cut into a living human being? But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that we can't. And sometimes, we just can't do that. When it matters most… we can't."

"Jack…" Kate found herself lost for words, staring helplessly into his eyes.

"You're a strong woman, Kate. While I can't condone some of your past actions, I can't say that I don't understand them – or that I haven't had the urge, albeit unsatisfied, to do exactly what you did to some of the abusive husbands I met while working the ER. But what I said to you in the beginning still applies." He gently cupped her cheek, stroking lightly with his thumb. "We should all be able to start over."

She did the only thing she could think to do, and leaned over the small table to kiss him. She could feel his warm breath on her lips when the loud beeping of the hatch computer filled the air. "The button," she said breathlessly.

"Screw the button," Jack replied, his voice deeper than normal. But then he sighed deeply. "I'll get it." He got up and walked towards the computer room. "Hold that thought," he tossed back over his shoulder. Kate laughed a little. But when Jack came back into the room, his face was serious again. Kate's eyes clouded with disillusionment – now that he'd had a minute to think, surely he'd change his mind about second chances, right? She braced herself for the emotional blow.

"I would like nothing more than to kiss you right now," Jack began. "And then find somewhere that's really private and do a hell of a lot more than kiss you." He sat down next to her. "But I need to know that I'm who you want as well. Sawyer…"

Kate touched her fingers to Jack's lips. "Sawyer is like Wayne, and I think I was looking in him to see if I could find good qualities I might have missed in Wayne, so that I could teach myself to feel guilty about killing him. But I can't. Sawyer is the kind of man who pretends to have stolen a girl's inhalers, who used that to take advantage of me, and who makes the slimiest innuendos one can hear outside of a bar frequented by Italian sailors." She moved her hands to the back of Jack's head and pulled his face closer to hers. "He takes away the second chance. You make me want it back." Their foreheads touched. "Why would I want anyone but you?" she whispered, her lips a breath from his.

Jack kept his mouth close to hers and whispered. "I can't answer that without sounding like an egotistical jerk."

"You already said doctors were egotistical," she replied. And smiling, she pressed her lips to his.


End file.
